Long Links #3

On my subreddit I put up links to individual videos, websites, or blog posts, etc. Any of these things can be "consumed" (paid attention to) in one sitting (generally speaking). Those are "short links". But "long links" take (or take me) more than one sitting and to me seem to not belong in the same context as short links.

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Recently (in the last 6 months) I watched the following movies (among others):

My Name is Sarah (a woman finds community and romantic love in an Alcoholics Anonymous group even though she doesn't drink)

The Book Shop (a woman opens a book store in small-town coastal England, has to deal with enemies)

Detroit Unleaded (Two Arab-Americans in the Detroit area -- a young man, who works in a gas station convenience store, and a young woman, who comes from a rich family -- meet and fall in love)

Nowadays, I watch movies to pass the time, not to explore the world of human experience or rewire my brain (more what I was going for when I was in my 20s). I think these movies are not great movies in the way that Citizen Kane, Last Year at Marienbad, Stalker, or Testament are great. But if I wanted to rewatch those great movies, I could, and I could probably find more like them. Nothing really prevents me. But I actually prefer to watch these unassuming movies.

Actually, I think that there is more going on under the surface in these movies that I don't catch because I don't process audiovisual information quickly enough. Films do a lot of hinting because they don't have time to flesh out everything they're trying to portray, and subtle things like that go over my head, although I can see the hints happening and say to myself "they're trying to say something". The films, being unassuming, don't strike my brain hard to make it notice. Perhaps I would understand their ideas better if I rewatched them. I'm not sure I would want to rewatch them, but I could imagine myself doing so if I owned them on DVD and had a hard time getting new media. (Like kids back in the day watching the same VHSes.)

I think it's exactly the fact that these movies don't strike my brain that hard, or engage in too-strong of visceral engagement, that makes me open to them and like watching them enough to finish them.

I do think that despite that I find them "just to be a way to pass the time", on one level I think even then they do important cultural work by expressing an aesthetic. People can find each other through aesthetics and are encouraged to continue in their personal vibes/aesthetics/sarkars by the bits of time they can spend watching films congenial to them.

These movies are small, quiet, and unassuming. (Not necessarily that the characters or their experiences are, but more that the films themselves don't assert themselves the way that "hard-hitting", "exciting", "sexy", "weighty", "important" movies do.) Although it would not be small, quiet, and unassuming of them, what if those three vibes became greater, or dared to try harder and do bigger things, without losing their roots? I think people carried along by those vibes might be good at doing things that other people are not.

(I think that that last paragraph connects to my own writing a lot. To take one example, I think my book Letters to People who Care would fit in to that same set of vibes.)

(Maybe someone who knows more about movies could list some unassuming movies that do something great.)

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I watched two video essays by biz barclay.. One of them on the binding of Isaac, God is Not Dead, and Midnight Mass, the other on the phenomenon of Snapewives.

The Snapewives one presents the question "what is religion?" and shows a particular new religion. I think its value for me was in showing my own relationship with God in an alien light. The Snapewives' relationships with Snape (their god) sound similar but different from my relationship with God, at least insofar as they hear from Snape and have some degree of devotion to him. The "varieties of religious experience" are profuse and it can seem as though we should give up the search for the real God, since it looks like there's a separate version for each group of people, made in the image of what would serve them. Can I really believe that I am in touch with a person, who is God, rather than am under some kind of force that produces religious experiences of whatever form suit my mind?

I can recommend the other video more highly, especially if, like me, you are someone who is modernist-leaning (i.e. not postmodernist), in favor of being active, in favor of listening to God's voice (an evangelical in some sense of the word?), because it presents the binding of Isaac, a story which in itself shows those pursuits to be dangerous. (The Bible sets dangerous precedents. Also (a la Kierkegaard?) the Bible at least in this story frustrates logical ethical thought processing (even though overall it supports it). "Formulalessness", perhaps.)

Modernism/activist religion is dangerous. Postmodernism is also dangerous (the inability to be excellent, the inability to do what needs to be done, to coordinate cultural activity, the danger of settling for socially-convenient shared values rather than asking about the possibility of causing harm not currently part of consensus reality, such as harming God, or harming humans in ways the social consensus doesn't recognize.) Is there a counterpoint to the binding of Isaac that shows the dangers of postmodernism or other anti-activity philosophies/cultural drifts? Perhaps the rest of the Old Testament, as a whole, is about that. A counterpart to this video could be one about the call of Abraham (in Genesis 12 and renewed later in Genesis), and the need for society to have crazy (literally mentally ill like we might diagnose Abraham), outsider antagonists to the social order to drive moral progress forward.

Both videos are 3 hours long. I think the video essay format, especially the longer the essays get, lends itself to imparting energy to the viewer and giving them time to think about things. As mentioned above, I don't process audiovisual things the best, so I would latch on to some ideas as they were repeated throughout the video, and then think about them for myself. Maybe part of the comparative advantage of video essays is in this energetic transfer and stewing tendency.

(If you combine the two videos, you get the question "how can you know that God (a specific God) is talking such that you should trust and/or obey the voice you hear?")

Humility and Giving up on Yourself

Some Christians seem to believe that pride is the chief evil. Humility is also seen as one of the best virtues. It's true that pride can be dangerous, but so can a certain kind of humility.

Who is your worst enemy? Is it you? Then you have to guard against yourself, not trust yourself. Is that a Christian answer, that you are your own worst enemy? It's sometimes popular in the church, but my naive impression is that that isn't Jesus' emphasis. I feel like for him, Satan is the main enemy, and he often wants to encourage us to have confidence in ourselves. (Like telling people to go sin no more -- who does he think we are, people who can just not sin? Perhaps so.)

Who do you think hates you more, you, or Satan? Do you benefit from being your own worst enemy? You generally don't, but Satan does. Who would benefit from you falsely thinking that you are your own worst enemy? You don't, but Satan does. It takes the focus off him, and tempts you to sink into a state of giving up on yourself. This makes you less effective in doing good, which furthers Satan's agenda. If you give up on yourself, you are a conduit for a spirit of giving up on yourself, which affects other people.

If you try to be humble, you may think "poor little me" and give up on yourself. You may think that you are unworthy of holiness and thus unworthy of repenting.

You need to overcome all of your sinful habits and, most importantly, change yourself away from any way in which you do not share God's values. God can take away your sinful habits, but you are the only person who can do anything about what values you have. You are the only person who can repent (change your heart, at the level of your intentions and not just the feelings you have, which God could give you), and you need to repent 100%. You have time in which to do this, more than this life, but you can't put it off forever. You need to learn to love God with all of your heart, soul, mind, and strength someday. Giving up on yourself keeps you from giving your whole heart, whole soul, whole mind, and whole strength.

Pride is dangerous, but "pride is dangerous" is also dangerous. Humility is dangerous, too, if it gets in the way of repentance.

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A related danger is that if you give up on your ability to seek the truth, you will tend to believe more lies than otherwise, and will live accordingly. You have to fight to discover or sometimes even to believe the truth.

Alien View of Two Cities

Cities tend to be alike insofar as they are places to meet future spouses, raise families, go to school, work at a job, grow old, get born. Your whole life story can play out in a city, and there is a way in which your human life can sort of be lived the same no matter what city you live in. In Delhi or Lima (each under a cloud of smog), people meet future spouses, raise families, go to school, work at jobs, grow old, and get born. I went to Lima for a few days, when I was 17, and was impressed by the smog. But if I had stayed five years, while that would have been bad for my respiratory health, I might have gotten more involved in friends or perhaps a girlfriend, or a church, or something like that. The smog would have been a background condition, one which I noticed here and there, maybe every day, maybe not. But I would have been living my life, the important, (near?-)universally human parts of life, of developing as a person, caring about things which were emotionally weighty to me (God, art, science, etc.) and participating in other people's lives. I would have shifted back and forth from theism to atheism to agnosticism in my fiducial depths, and experienced whatever other essential features of the human condition. But the smog wouldn't have been worth mentioning.

The alien view of a city is to see the smog and not the people raising their families (and going to school, growing old, etc.), which is the familiar view of a city. Both the alien view and the familiar view are right, and both are wrong.

Except for time I spent in Davis, CA, going to college, I have lived my whole life in San Diego. I'm not particularly interested in travel, and tend to feel the monk's feeling of wanting to stay in my cell. When I'm feeling very local, I see nearby me only a few places, which comprise my whole world that I can see. It's as though San Diego is my house, and I'm looking out the window. My whole world is Southern California, plus a view into Mexico. The Imperial Valley to the east is a desert farming community, and Tijuana to the south is in another country, reputed to be dangerous. I don't go to those places very often. To the west is the Pacific Ocean, which is a watery desert. To the north is Los Angeles, which of all these neighboring places I have the strongest impression.

As an outsider, my view of Los Angeles is that it is a place of spiritual darkness. There is greater stress and hostility there than in San Diego. Los Angeles seems to have been shaped by the movie industry, which sells beauty, but it's an ugly place. The Hollywood neighborhood is not a vision of beauty. But the sun shines "all year long" (not literally true, but something like it). A constant 72 degrees Fahrenheit may sound idyllic (it's the temperature you set your thermostat to), but that 72 degree sun gnawing at your skin, day after day, becomes a horror. You find yourself irritable under its gaze. (We have spells of this in San Diego as well.) That irritating pleasantness can even have an obscene component, the obscenity of people being fed things engineered to please them. Hollywood actresses are selected for for appearing beautiful to American men, but I have come to feel like I'm looking at a Doritos chip, a snack chip for the eyes rather than for the mouth, which has a dark energy to it, something to make me high, addictive and bedazzling. Films themselves are like Doritos chips, though they are all superficially beautiful. There is an obscenity to their beauty, which I see as an alien to them. Los Angeles is a place of desperation (aspiring actors and musicians), of broken dreams, of exploitation. While not all of LA is in the movie or music industries, I would guess that this spills over into the city at large.

When I go to LA, I often come in on the train. As it approaches Union Station, where I get off, I see the same thing every time, a kind of industrial landscape, with the Los Angeles River running through it, channelized with nothing natural about it, graffitied, sometimes with trash and the belongings of homeless people. In San Diego, there's nothing exactly like it. The Skid Row equivalent in San Diego as I've experienced it is smaller, and I have felt uncomfortable but comfortable enough walking through it, but an Angeleno friend had me canceling my Greyhound tickets so I wouldn't have to go to Los Angeles' Skid Row, where the LA Greyhound station is located. There is a hostility in Los Angeles, and an aggressiveness, both in the way people drive, and in the things people say. My Angeleno friend once said "Welcome to LA" after a homeless person went off in a train station in a way I don't think I've ever heard in San Diego. Being homeless is stressful, but perhaps more stressful in Los Angeles.

I visited a therapist in San Diego one time at a particularly dark time of my life. He said good things about Portland, but his opinion was that Los Angeles was a spiritually dark place. I don't want to be unfair to spiritualities which are not Christian, but I will note that goth and occult spiritualities and aesthetics are relatively strong in Los Angeles, and while they could be defended by some as not being really bad for you, their imagery tends to be dark and often weird, a participation in horror. David Bowie went through his worst years in Los Angeles crawling deeper into cocaine and occultism, enabled by false friends and money.

Hollywood (and Los Angeles, to the extent that Los Angeles is a support organ for it) sells America, and the world, fake beauty, so no wonder Los Angeles itself has arguably the pleasantest weather in America (shared with San Diego), but is actually an ugly, dark place. But to be fair to Los Angeles, though I am familiar with San Diego in ways that I am not with Los Angeles, I can see San Diego, as well, as an alien. San Diego, often enough, is a place of genuine beauty, not fake beauty. San Diego is the good life, a genuinely nice experience. It shares some of Los Angeles' dark side (we have that gnawingly pleasant weather, and some of the traffic) and San Diego had (and has?) a relatively strong goth scene. But San Diego is a sleepy place, a kind of "last man" place. San Diego is more spiritually dangerous than Los Angeles, because in Los Angeles, you know something is wrong. But in San Diego, you feel like everything is right. The word "hedonism" sounds to some like cocaine and strippers on Sunset Strip -- a Los Angeles phenomenon -- but to me it sounds like a beautiful sunset at La Jolla Shores, or Coronado, or whatever other San Diego beach, that feeling of the "pacific" ocean calming you, quieting away the deeply personal side of you, drugging you with genuine psychological health. How can you really learn to love in San Diego, when it is at its "finest"? You have a better chance in Los Angeles.

Los Angeles is known for the film and music industries, and its container ports. San Diego is known for the military, and for craft beer and burritos and going to the beach. The World Famous San Diego Zoo is here as well.

The vulgar hedonism of Hollywood rock stars in the 1980s is probably too easily grown past. Also, the version of hedonism envisioned by transhumanists (for instance, discussed somewhat in X-Risk), while exciting and motivating to them, may seem sort of ridiculous and unnecessary to the average person. But San Diego, instead of radical hedonism represented by rock stars or transhumanists, represents normal hedonism, for normal people. If you want really good, human compatible experience, come to San Diego. Watch a sunset. Eat food from a taco shop. Drink a craft beer. Go surfing. Maybe stay home and watch a movie. Go check out a farmer's market on the weekend. Forget God. Lose your passion. Let go. Turn off the part of you that cares about anything outside of your lifestyle of normal humanity.

San Diego is the hedonism that normal people would choose, and already do choose, long before any advanced technology makes an Experience Machine possible. It may be the exact experience that people choose once they've tried all the "adventure programs of youth" that you can run on the Experience Machine. At the end -- our vision of heaven, I guess, will be San Diego, or culturally varied versions of it.

One San Diegan I knew lived in Germany for school, but came back to visit his parents in a neighborhood close to mine. He said that when he visited San Diego, he felt sadness. That was his alien view. I can connect with that -- the sadness of a beautiful sunset, all the people beautifully bedding down for one last night, as the dark settles in and they cease to exist.

San Diego says "look at things from the familiar view". Los Angeles says "look at things from the alien view". I feel like I would have a much easier time discussing the content of this post in Los Angeles-as-Los Angeles. I feel it very difficult to talk about it in San Diego-as-San Diego. In Los Angeles, we can have the possibility of really being aware of weird things, like that if we give $5,000 to a charity, it could save someone's life, a totally meaningless and abstract behavior from the point of view of an ordinary human's life. But that weird sacrifice, from our perspective, is like a gift from heaven for the person who benefits, who gets to live 35 more years (up to life expectancy, at least). In Los Angeles, we can be aware that the familiar view, normality, human nature, themselves are horrors, which prevent people from giving to anyone outside their own familiar lives. In Los Angeles we may long for something other than "this", and perhaps even occasionally cry out to God. But San Diego is self-sufficient. I don't want to be too kind to Los Angeles -- I don't know that Los Angeles leads people to love God. But at least in a sense it is unstable. San Diego is more hedonically stable, is a lower-energy point of cultural development. You can become aware of God if you can see outside the totality of the experience-as-experience. You can become aware of persons as persons, as more than just experiences, if there is some outside to the hedonic moment. A perfect San Diego could exclude you from loving God as a person, as a real being, and you would have no way to motivate yourself to leave that perspective. It would be a perfect sunset at the end of a 10/10 day.

The truth is found in totality. So while I have presented the alien views of the two cities, to be accurate, one should remember their familiar views. Every person is an alien to us and family to us, and every collection of people is alien and familiar. Most aliens have some element of horror to them, and so do most people, though there are some aliens who are like cities of God.

Suicide

How does MSLN deal with suicide?

I don't like writing about this subject, because I feel like I'm checking off the boxes of "things that an ethicist is supposed to deal with" or "things that an ethicist is supposed to make a ruling on as though they know anything". In a way, I would rather state the truth and not my rulings, and let my readers come up with their own rulings for themselves, based on their own understanding of the truth.

However, I have some experience with this topic, and perhaps can write to people who are contemplating suicide, or who might again contemplate suicide.

I don't believe that this life matters as much as atheists or some Christians do. This follows from MSLN. I think that our culture (and biology) scam us into thinking it is "the" thing. People make this life into a god, and they worship it by trying to control people so that they also worship that god. Death (at least, the first death) is more like "falling asleep". (The second death, the result of hardening, really is the end, and is something serious.)

Life is a time to be useful, whether through what we do or who or what we are.

I've never made plans to kill myself, but I've had my mind captured so that that action seemed like the default thing to do.

When I've been closer to suicide, I've done different things. I didn't really want to die, because I had things to do still. I also knew that as someone who was against the "life-god", I paradoxically had a greater duty to not kill myself, because people under its rule would automatically discount what I had to say against it, if they found out I had killed myself. I tried a number of different things to avoid killing myself, such as going to therapists (but the therapists were aggressive or manipulative, and not on my side, so I quit going), taking psychiatric medication for my bipolar disorder (a pre-existing, relatively contained condition made worse by the thing that was making me suicidal), exercising, talking to friends, and maybe other things that secular people pursue, to stave off "falling asleep".

I also prayed, and I wish that that always worked, so that I didn't have to do the secular things. That would say that God, and relating to God, were what saved a person, instead of a bundle of coping mechanisms which could contain God, or not, whatever works for you. The "life-god" cruelly smothers the part of people that wants to love God more than life.

Praying did help sometimes, and gave me the gift of having heard from God, on some occasions.

I think that being suicidal (and experiencing other unbearability to a lesser intensity, over a longer period of time) has given me a sense of confidence, through a confrontation with life and death. I am not sure if I learned all the lessons that I can from that time, but one that I might learn is to understand the full nature of love, which loves when times are good and when they are bad. Love is not full-grown except if it has exercised its ability to deal with the desert, when it goes unrewarded for years. It is also not full-grown if it does not pay a cost. Full-grown love has paid a cost that goes beyond what it is willing to pay. So I hope that by resisting death, I was learning to love something.

My temptation is to say that I was learning to love life, but then the life-god wins and I am pinned down on one side, no longer free to go to God. Is it possible to really love God, when life pursues you? I didn't feel like I was learning to love life by resisting death, and maybe I wasn't, and was only learning to love. And if I can be whole-souled, I love God and those whom God loves, and not the clothes we happen to wear.

The love that comes in the desert and is asked too much of does not feel like love. But it is love. Sometimes, what feels like love, is love, a different kind. But sometimes it only feels like love, and is something fake.

Omnisubjectivity and Anger Placeholder

Anger and lust are close parallels. Anger could be the lust to commit violence or murder on someone, or anyone. So a reader might be able to get a good idea of a view of omnisubjectivity and anger by reading Omnisubjective Sexuality and using their reason and imagination to adjust what it says to the case of anger. I probably should do this myself at some point and write a proper post, but for now, this paragraph serves as a placeholder for that effort.

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One notable difference: God does have to will that some beings not exist, and some beings deserve to not exist. An emotionally truthful way for God to be in tune with this fact is to be angry. (Another would be hate, and these two emotions might be variants of the same root.) If Legitimacy is angry, that anger is legitimate. So anger is not always illegitimate -- as long as when we are angry, we are angry at exactly what God would be angry at.

Anger is dangerous but not always sinful. Someday there will be no anger because there will be no illegitimacy.

Omnisubjective Sexuality

Epistemic status: "essay-grade". This is an essay and I don't have a reason to think it addresses the subject completely. Provisional.

According to MSLN (and any view that holds that God's omniscience entails his omnisubjectivity), God experiences all of our experiences himself, exactly as we do.

In any system of thoughts, it's likely for there to be unexpected and odd features emergent from how the thoughts in it interact with each other and the world, and one that I didn't completely expect with this aspect of MSLN was the thought that human sexuality (thoughts, imaginations, and sex acts) are experienced by God. As though, to put it bluntly, God experiences something like virtual reality porn whenever people are having sex. (And I suppose also experiences "emotional porn" (something like romance novels?) whenever people experience that.)

What would it be like to experience other people's private experiences as your own? Does God want to lust after his own children? I would think not. So then our sexual experiences put him in a state of psychological tension.

Rawlette points out that there are "qualia of ought-to-be-ness" and of "ought-not-to-be-ness". From an omnisubjective view, when we feel something that feels like "ought-not-to-be" (something unbearable (my word), or painful (closer to Rawlette's thinking)), God also experiences that exact feeling, the exact qualia of ought-not-to-be-ness. In lust, there is an element of the qualia of "I-have-to-have-this". So when we lust, or engage in lustful sex (is that the only kind?) God experiences those qualia exactly as we do.

Both "ought-not-to-be" and "I-have-to-have-this" have a volitional element. We have in us a prima facie movement to not experience what ought-not-to-be to us, and to pursue to the point of possession what we-have-to-have. To really experience ought-not-to-be in itself as a volitional consciousness is to feel the volitional element as well as the hedonic or experiential. Similarly with "I-have-to-have-this".

So does God get involved in sin when we lust after each other? Yes, and no. "Who" God is is never sinful. But on the level of "what", God can be involved in sin. He is on some level involved in everything that is, and some being is sinful or even evil.

Do we sin when we lust after each other? The boundary between who and what can be porous. What we are can be to some extent broken, insane, and bent toward bad or unsustainable ends. But who we are isn't necessarily so, and who we are is the essence of whether we are sinning or not. The porousness comes in how strongly we, with who we are, resist what we are. It may be impossible to be completely sure that you couldn't have tried harder to resist a bad "what". But if you really are resisting as much as you can, whether you can know that or not, then "who" you are is trustworthy (even if it doesn't look like that to anyone else).

What's it like to be, in who you are, innocent, while in what you are, bent toward evil? There is a tension there, which even humans can feel, but which God, the most-sensitive feels to a greater and more constant degree. So when we lust, we make life more difficult for God.

Sexuality is ground into "the very fibers of being human" (so it seems, and maybe to a large extent really is). We find it very hard to avoid it, in the world outside us, and within the flesh of our minds. There are biological reasons to favor sexual activity. When civilization was in its "survival mode" (we'll say, up until industrialization), sex was a way to work to fight against depopulation. Now that we are in "hedonic mode", sex is a medicine we use to fight against feeling bad. In our culture we have a strong need to think of sex as a good thing and as a hedonic thing. This enables us to feel good about ourselves, driven as we are to "hedonically survive" (fulfill the hedonic imperatives that we can't seem to help fulfilling, as though feeling bad was a fate as bad as or worse than death). Given the existential difficulties of "survival mode" and "hedonic mode" (which are real and to be taken seriously), how can we integrate a concern for God (who is subject to our sexuality) into how we live our lives?

(Furthermore, sexual activity can help bond people together in what they are, and even in who they are. Whether it is necessary for that purpose, or if there is an non-sexual way to do that, depends on each couple.)

A very helpful thing to do (if possible) would be to somehow or other not hold onto the qualia of "I-have-to-have-this". Sex without "I-have-to-have-this" is not lustful. Also helpful would be seeking to have sex only within God's preferences. Sex that respects each partner as a human being, for instance. (Or looking to the Bible for an idea what his preferences might be about human sexuality. That's something that this post does not directly address, and someday I do want to. This one mostly focuses on sexuality in MSL.) These are good goals for ethically theistic people to pursue if they are married or seeking to be married.

Even if we minimize the sinfulness of sexuality, it may always be weird for God to experience our sexual relations. So we might try to be sexual in a way that tries to minimize that weirdness, using our empathy and imaginations to get an idea of how to do that.

It may be possible to not be sexual, perhaps by understanding and letting go of the qualia of "I-have-to-have-this", and the hedonic cost of being less sexual or asexual (the reason why sex is a medicine in "hedonic mode") may go down if we get beyond "I-have-to-have-this".

(Relatedly, it is possible that we can undergo spiritual manipulation using sexuality as an access point. The spirit of "amorousness" is a powerful one. Maybe it's like a kind of "spiritual alcohol" that we can get drunk on if we ever find the liquor lying around. Or if anyone (human or inhuman) spikes our water with it. We are being spiritually attacked by strong feelings that don't really belong to us but which loudly insist that they do, filling our minds seemingly completely, in the moment that they are there. People who experience mental illness sometimes feel the loud insistentness of depression, but fight against it so that they do not commit suicide. Out of love for life (or people, or God), they don't kill themselves. They find some way to resist. So, we can realize that whatever mood is making sex seem necessary or inevitable is not us and is enthroned above us and pinning us down so we are not as fully free to follow God. This realization itself, or other actions we take as a result, may free us from that feeling that insisted it was part of who we were. Sometimes to realize that Satan is at work is to be free.)

What are the boundaries of "being sexual"? We think of sexuality in a hedonic or experiential sense (genital excitation and satisfaction and the thoughts and feelings adjacent to it). An older meaning, more true to the etymology of "sexual", I suppose, is "the relations between men and women" (or between a man and a woman). Both of these definitions are polar, having at one end the very blatantly sexual (that which are only genital excitation and satisfaction themselves or which are only seen or naturally seen between men and woman) and at the other end personal experience that could easily not be sexual (often does not involve genital excitation or satisfaction, or often can be seen outside of contexts of a man and a woman). So perhaps the leading to consider God's omnisubjectivity in how we relate to each other sexually naturally leads us to consider his omnisubjectivity in the non-sexual aspects of life. (Sometimes the way to be considerate of God in our sexuality is very much the same as in our non-sexuality, and in some cases our sexuality is functionally hard to tell apart from our non-sexuality, so to be considerate in all of sexuality isn't too different from being considerate overall.)

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One value of sexual experience is the "post-traumatic value" of having experienced the same thing as someone else. In other words, the value of being able to help people with recovery from trauma.

God has to experience sexuality by way of experiencing what humans experience firsthand. So maybe we can understand what he goes through best only if we have experienced what he has through human sexuality, through ourselves having participated in it firsthand, and also have the empathy and imagination to understand how weird it would be for him to go through that with all of his creation when they are sexual.

I think that what is actually good can evade ethical formulas. I would not recommend being a criminal so that you can reach out to criminals better, but if, for non-ethical reasons, you were a criminal, and then came to reject a life of crime, allowing you to reach out to criminals, then you may be able to do good in that area that nobody else can. The deontological ("don't commit crime") and the consequentialist ("bring about the best outcome") are in conflict and there may not be a rational resolution. Fortunately for the consequentialists, people's lives don't follow reason, allowing for better outcomes than what human best practices can allow.

But "don't commit crime" (or "don't have lustful sex") are not simply human best practices, but ways to avoid causing pain to Legitimacy himself, and thus ways to avoid doing what is really wrong in itself. So can I recommend wronging God? Fortunately, in terms of practical advice, it's easy in this case to say "many, many people can fulfill the role of helping God deal with what he's gone through during the many generations, whether in terms of crime or of lustful sex, so on the margin, avoiding sin yourself is worth pursuing".

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Why did God create sexuality? It could be that the element of sexuality that would be weird for God to participate in was not originally or ideally in his design for being human. There is more to sexuality than the sex act, which is clearly seen in the "man-woman" definition given above. And certainly lust was not in God's original or ideal design for human sexuality.

Maybe it's simple enough to say "It's all explained by MSLN theodicy." But I tend to want to find other possible explanations if possible. But that is where I will leave things for now.

(Some thoughts on how the Bible might show that some aspects of sexuality weren't original or ideal).

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This post so far has focused on actual sex, and not on pornography. But is looking at porn sufficiently analogous?

Do people who look at porn have qualia of "I-have-to-have-this" toward the people photographed or filmed in it? Not in a full-fledged sense where they rationally think they will. But still enough to bother God? Probably a lot of times they do. But what if they don't? Is that a problem?

If they don't because they simply have no sexual response to what they see, then I guess there's nothing wrong with them looking at porn, on that count. God wouldn't "overfeel" (like "overhearing" a conversation) any qualia of "I-have-to-have-this" directed toward his children. But there might be a middle place, where the person looking at porn is aroused, but lacks desire of any kind for the people being shown, themselves. I'm not sure what to think here. Is arousal a kind of bodily "I-have-to-have-this" (like how trust is a bodily "I-value-you")? That sounds plausible enough to me to avoid looking at things that arouse me sexually, regardless of whether I desire the people I look at. Qualia are qualia, regardless of whether they are in the part of the experience body which really is me or in the part that is only part of my physical body.

What about drawn or animated porn? Or if someone has a tendency to be sexually aroused by inanimate objects or abstract symbols? It could be that on some subtextual level, what is desired is a real human being. It's like there's a hunger for a Sexual Partner, who is undifferentiated and vaguely human, and must be physically human-shaped in some way to satisfy the person hungry for it, and this is what they intuitively relate to when they become aroused by something that is less literally human or seemingly not human at all. A person's name is a mere word but represents whatever features they possess, including their physical body. So maybe an abstract symbol could be a word for Sexual Partner, which can satisfy the human body with enough of a human body or personal presence of its own. God probably doesn't even want to lust after Sexual Partner as a mental picture of one (or any) of his children. The simantic word Sexual Partner connects to... perhaps all human beings. This sounds plausible enough to me for me to avoid looking at drawn or animated porn, or if I become aroused by abstract symbols or whatever to not seek arousal through them.

So while I am not 100% sure that all forms of porn are equivalent to lust or lustful sex, I see enough here to err on the side of avoiding them, and recommending people to avoid them. Ethically, porn is lust to me, and maybe in the future, I will feel more certain on an epistemic level.

This section introduces some "philosophical moves" which might have far-reaching consequences that I have not yet thought through -- may break things elsewhere. One thing it might imply is that all sex is lustful. The human sexual response involves your body having to have a Sexual Partner, no matter what you feel, and it pulls on you despite whatever you really want -- and this also pulls on God in his omnisubjectivity. However, there is pain of varying levels of unbearability, and in order to spare God, if you must experience an unbearable pain, experiencing a less-unbearable unbearable pain is better. So the ideal of lustless sex (or the leading-in-the-direction-of lustless sex) is still a helpful one.

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What makes lust a quale of "I-have-to-have-this" may simply be that it is an unbearable pleasure that calls for its relief through a sex act. So if you want to avoid lustfulness in your sexuality, you can try to reduce the unbearable element of it to a minimum.

Perhaps this is a simpler way to show why God would prefer that we avoid drawn or animated porn, or arousal through abstractions.

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I realized that I should clarify exactly why I thought that the God of MSLN wouldn't want to lust after humans.

Lust is a sin in the Bible, and so the God of the Bible can't lust and would feel a kind of psychic "shear" from his omnisubjective experience of our lust.

But what about in the case of non-Biblical MSL? MSL begins from a fairly limited set of starting assumptions. Does an aversion to lust follow from them?

Sexual desire can involve (always involves?) some unbearability. Any sexual desire that involves unbearability is something God can't bear for all time, and is illegitimate.

Is there something wrong with desiring another person in a sexual way, if there is no unbearability to it? Well, are there any qualia of "I-have-to-have-this" when we look at someone we sexually desire? If so, is there anything wrong with us "having-to-have" someone? If we have to have someone (or some experience of them or with them), are we putting them (or it) higher than Legitimacy? That sounds true.

God has to put Legitimacy higher than anything else. This is a reason why the Son has to make the sincere psychological motion of letting himself die -- and go through with it -- so as to put it ahead of his own life. By being legitimate in that way, the Son validates Legitimacy, allowing for existence.

So God feels psychic shear whenever we make anything into an idol. I think usually or always when we have to have something, it can crowd out all other competitors in our minds in certain moments, including God.

From a simantist perspective, or that of the original person, it may well be that God views us as his children. The fundamental unit of reality is not experience bodies, or hedonic calculators, or even conscious Law, but rather persons. There is a "thickness" to being a person which includes family relationships, perhaps. Being a father may be something primal, may not just be a technicality of being biological. And, the inappropriateness of incest may be deeper than simply being something recommended by biology or culture. Biology and culture make poor gods, but it does make sense that they could reflect some of God's ideal design. The notion that power imbalances can make sexual relationships inappropriate may be a Godly one and not just a feature of our current culture (it sounds convincing to me, for what that's worth). In many respects, God is much more powerful than we are.

Having run through all this, perhaps some sexual desire for another human remains that does not stress God at all to "overfeel". But, in my limited experience (n = 1), that covers most or perhaps all of it.

In that case, other than those who are truly asexual, we all stress God, in the course of living life. (To be fair to sexuality, there are other ways we do, like anger, or any of the non-sexual sins.) Maybe there are ways for us to not stress God so much.

I'm not sure I've exhausted all the possible reasons why God would prefer not to lust after us, and there may well be good objections to this that I haven't thought of, but for the sake of getting this post done, I will say that's my case.

Epiconcept

Saying negative things about having sex is not the most popular thing to do these days, and I can understand that saying "the lustful aspect of sex is inherently bad and even if we can have unlustful (or less lustful) sex it might be weird for God" might sound like a harmful thing to some people.

We can't bear to think that we aren't seeking the truth or in touch with the truth, so we try to bend what people say the truth is so that we can feel like the truth says something that works for us and our needs. We don't accept this way of thinking in the realms of science and technology (at least in principle), but we do in the realms of politics and religion, which we seem to think are designed by us or for us. I think that the facts of God are the facts, and that God was not designed by us, for us. But I can understand that some facts cause harm, in the real-world of people trying to "install" them in their lives.

I think that truths which are poorly epiconcepted can certainly be harmful and to an extent it's my responsibility to try to epiconcept them better. I don't know of a way of expressing the truth in this that will never cause harm to anyone. I think that it can do good for the people who should hear it, and I would guess that most people who read this blog would be the sort to read random, potentially harmful ideas and not come to (too much or too-permanent) harm.

Maybe with a lot of my posts, I would leave things be and not try really hard to make what I'm saying safe, but sexuality is such a sensitive issue and so worked into our bodies and our current culture, that I think it's worth getting into that here.

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Shame is a biological and cultural construct that is not necessarily what God wants you to feel. It may seem to motivate holiness, but there are better ways to become holy.

Humans like to say that you are how you appear on the outside. This way, they can hold you to account for your behavior, so that their lives can go better. There is some validity to this. But a lot of what you do reflects what you are and not who you are, or some kind of spirit that has come over you. Humans have power over other humans psychologically, but they are less valid than God. God sees you for who you are, and cares about who you are, not your physical nature or what has come over you.

It can be hard to tell the difference sometimes between who you are and what you are. Maybe you could try harder to resist the spirits that possess you. Maybe sometimes you should. But what is clear is that you are not automatically the same as whatever you do, and it is possible that your sexuality is a thing that is tacked onto you, and not something that is essentially you.

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If you think you have harmed God, you might feel a lot of guilt. Your guilt feelings themselves are felt by God and are inherently negative. If they lead you to repent, or some other valuable change, they are worth feeling. But otherwise, no. You don't need to feel guilt over what you don't really have control over. It is important to try to do the right thing in the cases where it's really up for grabs (where you can succeed, as opposed to not having a real chance, due to what you are). Satan can use guilt feelings against you, which is something to consider.

What's really important is who you are in the end, not what or even who you are now. The present matters only to the extent that it feeds into who you are in the end. The present is important, but not the only period of time. God wants to help reclothe you with a better nature, if you will accept it.

Runners run better when they look ahead of them, even to the farthest horizon possible, rather than looking back. Looking at the pavement is necessary sometimes to avoid tripping, but the far horizon is a better place to look if you can.

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Your body is like your parents. Both your body and your parents were handed down to you. Ideally you honor your parents, even though there are aspects to them that aren't trustworthy. Your body is the same way. You can love your parents, and your body, overall, even if there are aspects to them that are untrustworthy.

The appearance of a human body can tempt people to lust. It's up to them to not give in, but it makes their lives harder when they have to experience that. Lusting after a body disrespects it, as well as hating it because it can be tempting.

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Look at sex not as negative or positive, but as a mixed thing.

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To a large extent, our ability to comply with God's wishes with regard to sexuality is limited, because our bodies are automatically sexual in ways we do not choose. God can give us new bodies which enable us to obey.

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The point of talking about sin and about harm to God is to love God, by turning against sin and ceasing to harm God -- especially, to someday become the person who loves God completely and does not sin or harm God at all.

Sexuality is not always the most morally relevant thing to consider. In some moments it can be very much the most morally relevant thing to consider. In other moments, there are other things that are more important. Some actions or attitudes (sexual or not) can have far-reaching negative consequences. Others don't. It's good to make sure you do what is really important, and avoid what it is really important to avoid, first, and after that worry about less important things. Sometimes sexual sin is not the most important problem to deal with, and dealing with it should be put off until later.

Hopefully in some sense we are all growing in moral resources and thus over time can afford to pay for more good actions and get further and further into "diminishing returns". In other words, as you grow as a person, you can deal with (and thus are potentially responsible for) subtler things. It's like what happens when you know someone for a long time and have given them all the gifts that they most urgently needed, and now are finding more and more subtle or small ways to add to how you help them.

Avoiding sin in such a way that you don't love God is more undesirable to God, and more dangerous, than trying to love him as best as you can but having a hard time controlling what you do, feel, think, etc. The latter can be destructive to others and yourself, and can give God pain, but the former is more likely to lead you to hardening and to exuding a spirit that tempts people to harden themselves.

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This is a basic attempt to epiconcept "omnisubjective sexuality". I don't know that it's the best that could be made. A really high-quality epiconcepting is done by people, not by words. In other words, in the context of a friendship, some difficult concepts can be made trust-able. Or, perhaps if two people who are married take this post seriously, they can help to develop an approach to sexuality together which is considerate of God -- maybe they have to come up with some of the aspects or practices of that themselves, and need each other to fully realize the epiconcept of this post.

I can't offer any of this, except the usual for a blog post, which is to offer to reply to comments on the post.

But I thought I should mention that epiconcepting can go farther than just a "disembodied" text.

Life Scams; Nice Maturity

From my notes:

Life scams: How the motions of life, of your life story, can scam you.

I'm not sure how many there are. But here is one:

You feel great in youth but have problems: the opposite sex / romance, not being respected, being trolled by friends/foes/emotions, lack of confidence, lack of outward success.

Then as you struggle to resolve all those things, you gradually or in obvious phases or moments come to not feel great. Maybe you enter a time where life is terrible. But, somehow or other many of your characteristically youthful problems resolve, with increased experience or being "broken open" by life stresses. Now, the temptation is to settle on this nice life, follow your instincts and pleasures, and become shallow, forget God to a large extent and not be altruistic. Your natural ability to be serious, to will, to long for somewhere other than "here", is broken down by stress, and that broken-downness allows you to enjoy social validation, a kind of "peace", health, well-being, and pleasure. You can be an ordinary human, and no one will object.

Somehow, you have to see the temptation and spiritual attack in this, see what it would be easy to see as good as dangerous and mixed. You may have to remember to have courage to restore yourself to seriousness, quietness, and another kind of "peace".

The scam works by beating you into a place where you "just want to be happy" and then offering you a way to be happy by giving you what you had longed for for years.

(It gives you some of what you had longed for for years.)

Book Review Preview: City of God by Augustine

I'm interested right now in Catholicism, but also in spiritual X-risk. That is, the possibility of the state of civilization getting to where it hinders "catastrophic" (however defined) numbers of people from reaching God, or, in other words, causes or is upstream of "catastrophic" numbers of people hardening. One spiritual X-risk would be for a kind of Brave New World scenario to evolve. I can see this as a default outcome of secular culture given the way it is now and where it's headed. One might think that a better long-term future for humanity would be under the rule of the Church.

(Some people would wonder why Christianity is the right choice for all of humanity, and this is a good thing to bear in mind.)

If the Christian Church ruled over the whole world, what if it was teaching (or embodying) the wrong thing? It could mislead both on a "textual" or conscious level, or on a "subtextual" or subconscious level. It could fatally impede people's full love of God with their hearts, souls, minds, strengths, or any combination thereof. This would further Satan's eternal agenda, but the Church could also open up people to Satanic access in the "merely" here-and-now (abusive cultures, supernatural attack).

If so, would it be able to be corrected? Would it discourage self-correction? Could that wrong teaching or embodiment keep people out of heaven, even if it might be excellent at keeping them in the Church?

If the answer to that last question is "yes", then if we are "longtermists" about spiritual well-being, we should look at the spiritual failure modes of the Church as it might become in the future, and especially those of the Church ruling over the whole world. How can Satan use the Church? If the Church isn't aware of how he might, he probably will.

So I want to consider the failure modes of different Christianities, when it comes to spiritual X-risk. The most obvious candidate for "Christianity that might rule the world" is Roman Catholicism. But in the farther future, that may change. However, for now, it is an example of an existing pro-establishedness, pro-authoritarian Christianity, and is the largest Christian organization, so is currently closest to realizing a "rule of the Church over all". So I want to understand Catholicism better, especially in its political dimensions. (I hope to explore other Christianities, particularly Reformed political thinking, which are in favor of something leaning "integralist", and also the anti-establishment Christianities, to see what their spiritual failure modes are.)

I am aware that my own project is in some ways like the Catholic project (both are concerned with holiness, civilization, an intermediate afterlife, natural theology, the ways in which Christian religion relates to all of reality -- and there may be other similarities I'm not aware of at this moment), but I think I base my thinking on different starting assumptions or spirits, and I feel like it might be wise to understand more clearly exactly what the similarities and differences are between the New Wine System or especially my own MSLN project, and Catholicism. Perhaps by reading a foundational book in Catholic thinking, I can see this more clearly.

(I don't want to try to be anti-Catholic by pursuing this, and the ecumenical side of me would hope that if any Catholics read of the potential failure modes of Catholicism and see something they realize they haven't taken into account adequately, they would seek to reform Catholicism to protect it and its followers from that danger. I think Catholicism is genuinely Christian and probably the values it most aspires to are best served by facing the dangers that could accompany its dominance. So this project should be aligned with Catholic interests, to some extent. However, I sense that MSLN will end up somewhat at odds with Catholicism, just as it should with all other existing Christianities.)

(This study may be of particular value to warn people who are into MSLN, since after all, MSLN shares some of Catholicism's project.)

(Also, it occurs to me to consider, what about if other religions sought to be the one religion over all the world? I feel like Christianity is the one to consider first, partly because I am trying to further it in some sense and want to know how things could go wrong if "I" were in charge of things; partly because I think as the largest religion currently and (in the Catholic church) the largest organized religion, it is the most obvious contender for "religion that rules over the world"; partly because I feel least out of my depth in thinking about it. But an analogous project should be pursued for each of the religions. I suppose that such a project could be pursued by someone who believed in the religion, or by someone outside the religion. If I were to pursue one of these projects, I would judge the religions by the standard of MSLN.)

(Also, what are the dangers of a bad religious pluralism? Imagine all the religions coexisting, functioning in some ways as a religion over all, in a way that is spiritually dangerous.)

I've had a copy of Augustine's City of God for a long time that I've never read, and it seems like a fairly basic thing that talks about the relationship between religion (Christian), non-religion (non-Christianity), and politics. I wouldn't be surprised if I see it referenced a lot in other books on that or those topics. City of God is actually not just a Catholic book. I would guess it's part of the lineage of a lot of Orthodox and Protestant thinkers as well, because it was written before the major church splits.

The copy I have is abridged ("for modern readers"), the Vernon J. Bourke abridgement (introduction by Etienne Gilson; tr. by Gerald Walsh, Demetrius Zema, Grace Monahan, and Daniel Honan). That's probably good enough for me (the fact that it's somewhat abridged doesn't bother me too much). Maybe if I really want to get into ancient or medieval Christianity I can get an unabridged edition to re-read. Ultimately, I'm not concerned with what Augustine said, but rather with the reality of the present and future, but I think whatever influence I can get from him could be helpful in my own thinking. I think that whatever I read will help me get closer to understanding Catholicism, even if I could theoretically get even closer by reading the parts that were abridged.